Arthur Rimbaud was a visionary French poet who wrote all his startlingly original verse as a teenager. After the age of 20, he abandoned creative writing. He died shortly after his 37th birthday. The wolf howls beneath the leaves Spitting up the gorgeous plumes Of the fowl on which he…
Arthur Rimbaud was a visionary French poet who wrote all his startlingly original verse as a teenager. After the age of 20, he abandoned creative writing. He died shortly after his 37th birthday. In a green hollow where a river sings, Moss sways wildly in ribbons of silver; The sun…
Charles Baudelaire was an innovative and macabre French poet of the 19th century. Often, for fun, the men of the crew Catch albatrosses, vast birds of the seas, That follow the ship like lazy companions As it glides its way over bitter depths. No sooner are they pinned to the…
Charles Baudelaire was an innovative and macabre French poet of the 19th century. You who, like a thrusting knife, plunged into my plaintive heart; You who, strong as a demon horde, Arrived, insane and all adorned: From my humble spirit Build your bed and your domain; O wretch to whom…
I am excited to announce that the Texas Institute of Letters has selected my book Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Mayan Poetry as a finalist for the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation. On April 5, at the TIL annual banquet, the institute will announce the winner and present…
Mario Benedetti was a prolific Uruguayan writer and poet. The tale is very simple you are born you contemplate afflicted the reddish blue of the sky the bird that emigrates the clumsy beetle that your shoe will smash bravely you suffer you cry for food and out of habit because…
Qal‘at al-Ḥamra, known by the Spaniards as Alhambra, was a Moorish fortress and castle in Granada that was captured during the Catholic Reconquista. Pleasant the voice of the water to those wearied by black sand, pleasant to the concave hand the curving marble of the column, pleasant the delicate labyrinths…
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably one of the most well-known poets in the world. This is one of his most popular poems. I like you when you’re silent, for you seem as if you’re gone, and you hear me from afar,…
Rumi is the name by which we remember Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, known also as Molavi or Molānā (“Master”). He was a 13th-century Persian poet and mystic of the Sufi tradition. His ecstatic poems about love and union with God have been widely translated. Below is one of his hundreds…
Rumi is the name by which we remember Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, known also as Molavi or Molānā (“Master”). He was a 13th-century Persian poet and mystic of the Sufi tradition. His ecstatic poems about love and union with God have been widely translated. Below is one of his hundreds…
